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A hard drive is a miracle of modern technology.
硬盤驅動器是現代技術的一個奇跡。
For $50 anyone can buy a machine that can comfortably store the contents of,
只要花上50美元，每個人都能買上一臺機器，輕松地將牛津大學
say, the Bodleian Library in Oxford as a series of tiny magnetic ripples on a spinning disk of cobalt alloy.
博德利圖書館中的書籍內容儲存為鈷合金旋轉圓盤上的一系列微小磁波紋。
But, as is often the case, natural selection knocks humanity's best efforts into a cocked hat.
但通常自然選擇把人類最大的努力打得一敗涂地。
DNA, the information-storage technology preferred by biology, can cram up to 215 petabytes of data into a single gram.
DNA是生物學偏愛的一種信息存儲技術，它可以將215拍字節的數據塞進一克的物質中。
That is 10m times what the best modern hard drives can manage.
這一儲存量是現代最好硬盤驅動器可存儲量的一千萬倍。
And DNA storage is robust. While hard-drive warranties rarely exceed five years,
而且DNA存儲也很穩定。雖然硬盤的保修期一般不會超過五年，
DNA is routinely recovered from bones that are thousands of years old
DNA通常是從數千年前的骨頭中提取出來的
(the record stands at 700,000 years, for a genome belonging to an ancestor of the modern horse).
（最久遠的記錄來自于70萬年前，基因組屬于現代馬的祖先）。
For those reasons, technologists have long wondered whether DNA could be harnessed to store data commercially.
出于那些原因，技術人員一直想知道是否可以利用DNA來進行商業數據存儲。
Archival storage is one idea, for it minimises DNA's disadvantages—which are that, compared with hard drives, reading and writing it is fiddly and slow.
想法之一是檔案儲存，因為它可以盡量減少DNA的劣勢—與硬盤驅動相比，讀取和寫入DNA既繁瑣又緩慢。
Now, though, a team led by Yaniv Erlich of Erlich Lab, an Israeli company,
現在由以色列公司Erlich Lab的Yaniv Erlich以及
and Robert Grass, a chemist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, have had another idea.
蘇黎世聯邦理工學院化學家Robert Grass領導的團隊已經有了另一種想法。
As they describe in a paper in Nature Biotechnology, they want to use DNA data storage to give all manner of ordinary objects a memory of their own.
他們在發表于《Nature Biotechnology》的一篇論文中稱，他們想要利用DNA數據存儲來給各種各樣的普通物體一份屬于他們自己的記憶。
The researchers describe a test run in which they encoded the Stanford bunny—a standard test image in computer graphics—into chunks of DNA.
研究人員描述了他們將斯坦福兔子（計算機圖形中的標準測試圖像）編碼成DNA塊的一次測試運行。
Those chunks were then given a protective sheath of silica nanoparticles. That served to protect them for the next stage,
然后給這些塊體涂上一層二氧化硅納米顆粒的保護層。這可以為它們進入下個階段提供保護，
in which they were mixed with plastic and used as feedstock in a 3D printer, which printed a model of the bunny.
在這一階段，它們與塑料混合，并被用作3D打印機的原料，該3D打印機打印出了這個兔子的模型。
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